By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I never joined the verbal fisticuffs uncouthly kicked up by some shameless issue-starved members and supporters of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) because like Mr. Sekou Nkrumah and Ms. Ursula Owusu, I found the entire episode to be unpardonably offensive and simply too disgusting for my craving or appetite. Interestingly, however, it strikingly reflected the low-down dirty tactics which the Asomdwoehene’s party is willing and capable of deploying in its desperate bid to hanging onto power at all costs.
One thing that I have been pondering since the Damongo national contretemps is the starkly indisputable fact that outside of the three northern regions and the Asante Region, the Eastern Region, from whence the presidential candidate of the main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) hails, contains more Muslim-dominated Zongos than any other part of Ghana. And in the Eastern Region itself, Akyem-Abuakwa, the natal stronghold of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, contains far more Muslim settlements than any other part of the country’s third most-populous region.
What I am obviously attempting to draw attention to is the fact that were people like Nana Akufo-Addo who, by the way, lives in the Muslim-dominated Nima community of Accra, that abjectly hostile and disrespectful of Ghanaian Muslims, as the NPP flagbearer’s detractors have sought to portray him, our Muslim kinsmen and women would not have found cities and towns like Kyebi, Akwatia, Suhum, Asamankese and Nsawam-Adoagyiri hospital enough to call their homes. I had fervently hoped that some of his key campaign-team operatives would highlight this fact by way of a poignant riposte to the unconscionable detractors of Ghana’s former Justice and Foreign minister.
Instead, his key handlers rather infelicitously appear to have handed their most formidable political opponents and mortal enemies precisely what they wanted – which was to put both their drum-major and the party as a whole on the defensive. Indeed, if they had been even half-mindful of the indelibly bloody history of what has now come to be known as the National Democratic Congress, the teeming supporters and sympathizers of the New Patriotic Party would have been quick to sharply and publicly observe that the political track-record of the so-called National Democratic Congress shamefully entails the savage dragging of their refuge-seeking opponents out of the sanctuaries of Christian churches, cathedrals and manses for summary executions, often after falsely and deviously promising the clerical hosts of their victims fair trials and punitive leniency.
In other words, what I am clearly suggesting here is that their morbid attempt to discredit and publicly humiliate Nana Akufo-Addo has more to do with the avid desire of the key operatives of the NDC and their propaganda outriders to even out the scores of their barbaric and bloody history. This is what clinical psychologists call PROJECTION, a wickedly convenient and strategic attempt at deflecting the clearly morally untenable.
Significantly, however, I felt that the strongest riposte to the NDC vis-à-vis the Damongo “Pissing Smear Campaign” (I have even just learned of the chief of Damongo’s unreserved expression of anger at the NDC bottom-feeding detractors of the NPP flagbearer’s tawdry attempt to also embarrass the chief himself), would have been for the backers of Nana Akufo-Addo to have readily pointed out the quite pedestrian fact that architecturally speaking, most well-constructed mosques, particularly small and medium-sized mosques in Ghanaian towns and villages, either frontally or dorsally have almost invariably attached to them urinals and washrooms. Often the latter come in the form of an open (or unroofed) box-like brickwork, such as existed in front of the mosque at Zongo-Dadam (or the Old Zonzo) behind my family house at Akyem-Asiakwa while I was growing up. In other words, Nana Akufo-Addo is far more likely to have been allowed to use one such place of convenience, as it were, had he happened to walk past the vicinity of any mosque during his recent listening-campaign tour of the Northern Regional town of Damongo.
The ultimate question, though, is why make a major campaign issue out of where any presidential candidate decides or happens to take a leak, more as a matter of physiological emergency, short of healthily highlighting the need for Ghanaian governments to prioritize public health policies, especially the imperative need to assisting residents of our legion poor and deprived towns and villages in constructing readily accessible and usable, or clean, places of convenience?
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Selected Political Writings” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].
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